Too Many Anniversaries and Too Many Memories

One of the anniversaries is my little Eemie’s death last year, at age 17. She was only about 14 in this picture, maybe a bit younger. But she never looked much different from this. Even the day she was “put to sleep” the vet thought she was a very sick 5 year old and not the elderly kitty she really was…She was my all time favorite cat, but i won’t try to replace her, or get another. I cannot do it, and will not try…

This photo is of Joe Cornelio and me in 2006, just after he was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, which would finally kill him, or complications thereof, two years ago today. I stil miss him dearly.

At the height of Joe’s illness, when he was completely paralyzed except for his eyes, and could not speak or move, he was able to use an eye gaze computer known as ERICA to speak with. ERICA registered the glint in his eye and allowed him to spell out each word by looking at the letters of the alphabet, which you can see on the screen in the photo, and then he could ask the computer to speak what he spelled by looking at the “speak” function. It was laborious, yes, but it worked well enough that we could actually have skpye converations by phone when I could not get in to see him in person, and I would set up my computer by my paintings and do some artwork by “videophone” so that he could watch me work while we talked.

This is Joe — weird how I never saw the changes in him in life but always saw him as “my old Joe” except in these photos — using the ERICA.

Pam and Joe, smiling at one another…

The other anniversary of this month is that three years ago, I was sadistically restrained (the first of several such incidents) on April 24th at Middlesex Hospital, absolutely traumatized by it and have not forgotten it yet. I tried to get redress, and we had JCAHO go in to investigate, but it did no good, because the Joint Commission largely doesn’t care about how often general hospitals use restraints and seclusion on patients in psychiatric units and doesn’t even track their usage. Try and find out about it. It is impossible. They track use of R and S in psychiatric hospitals, pure and simple, that is to say, State Hospitals, and private psychiatric hospitals, but not in general hospital units. So what good is that, I ask you? Most people who have severe psychiatric illnesses (chronic) are not hospitalized in this day and age in private hospitals but on psychiatric units in general hospitals, where the treatment can be tantamount, as I know all too well, to what the UN in March called torture.

Finally I was going to upload a bunch of photos of my tiny apartment but in one fell swoop I erased everything in my iPhoto library, including all the new photos. and, well, that was that! All I have left is whatever was saved in the ipad Photostream, which was precious little when it comes down to it. Stupid me!!

So today is the anniversary of Joe’s terrible death and I am trying not to think about that and all the other anniversaries coming up…It looks like it is going to be a bright sunny day here in Connecticut so I will try to take a walk and maybe do some artwork if I can get up the energy to do so…